Effective Martial Arts For Real World Situations

VIDEO: You should know What is the Best Martial Art for a Street Fight.

San Soo Kung Fu and Krav Maga seem effective but the downside seems that you cannot fully execute the techniques because they will really hurt someone.

Jack Welch, -Thirty-plus years experience with the nunchuck
I used to consider exotic martial arts with awe, believing that, with enough practice and training, one could develop magical powers and chop enemies with a single blow. Then I earned a black belt in TKD. Then I served time in a Texas prison and discovered that TKD was useless in that environment. So, together with other skinny white boys, we began to practice what we thought would be the most useful form of self defense to protect ourselves from 250 lb. African American gang members. The closest thing to a formal martial art to describe what we were practicing is Wing Chun. Wing Chun is, at its core, speed punching.

If you can throw fifty punches into someone’s face before they can blink their eyes, you can almost certainly force them off of you. Even if they grab you, you can punch into their face and, eventually, they’ll probably let go. That’s the ultimate goal, to force them to let go so that you can get away-not to stand their and fight toe to toe until one of you passes out. The premise is simple: punch as hard and fast as you possibly can until the guy lets you go. If you are up against Mike Tyson, you should probably have some Brazilian Ju-Jitsu training.

I used to watch the Gracies beat much larger opponents with their style. If you are up against multiple attackers, you should be able to run fast, because no matter how proficient you are in any specific art, it will boil down to strength. If you’re up against five teenaged kids, no problem. If you’re up against three 275 lb. gang members, you’re probably in trouble and no amount of martial arts training in any style is probably going to save you. Unless, of course, you are a 275 lb. gang member who also happens to be a Krav Maga expert.

Many weapons are outdated. That’s precisely why I practice with sticks of various lengths (from 1 foot to 6 feet), with baseball bats, hockey sticks, shovels and rakes, etc., as these are items you would expect to see on the side of the road or laying around anywhere you might be in a fight.

Michael Webber
What type of martial arts trains you the best for real fighting?
Well, armies and gangs are well-proven. As are police departments. The theme here is to organize, and weapon up. No one ever survives alone, and armies live or die on their weapons, training, and strategies. It also helps to have a good supply chain and a safe place to manufacture the stuff you need. Heck, even birth rates come into play.

This is not a joke. This is human history.
In typical urban environments, people travel with friends, guns, knives. Only in dangerous “inner urban” environments do you have a real “individual” battle ground. In that environment, it generally, but not exclusively, comes down to weaponing up and ganging up. Even then, the attacks of choice are AMBUSHES. A person NOT carrying a weapon isn’t carrying one because they think it is useless, they aren’t carrying one due to risk of police searches and arrest.

Anytime you think in terms of “personal combat” you are really dealing with subconscious notions of sport, of fairness, of manliness – of the police coming to stop deadly violence, or of a bouncer or the crowd coming to your rescue.I recently read of a woman who was assaulted walking home after midnight in the Mission District of San Francisco. Her assailant was a male, larger than her, and rushed her from behind from a quarter block away and tried to knock her out to the ground.

When she was on the ground, he tried to smash her head into the cement. She barely survived by fighting him off as best as she could. There was no warning, no stance, no opportunity to defend. Just a completely out of the blue effort to rape her by beating her half dead first. No scenario or martial art training can adequately prepare you to defend that.Likewise a young Vietnamese woman was beaten to death in Santa Ana outside a club where other people were hanging out. In a crowd! Most likely by another woman! Did girl beaten in photobombing death throw the first punch?

Fighting is dangerous. Your best defense is to stay away from trouble. Seriously. If you have ANY warning, the best physical defense is to run like hell, and THAT’S where you start training, because most people are so unfit they can’t make even running work for them.If you are at an In ‘n’ Out or other fast food joint and get in a fight (how likely is that?) I suppose you could make an argument that boxing is king, because it teaches you, drills you, trains you, to duck punches, which helps a lot – but the famous “sucker punch” is the one that gets the most people in the most fights, the punch thrown without warning. But assuming you have time to “get ready,” boxing teaches you to bob and weave and the jab keeps an opponent at a distance without the risk of doing so much harm that YOU are the one arrested later.

But since there isn’t any referee to keep the boxers separated, to keep them from clinching or even wrestling each other to the ground, it’s very likely a person attacking you will grab you and try to wrestle you to the ground, underneath him of course, where he can sit on you and punch the living daylights out of you.

In THAT setting, any grappling art – be it sombo, wrestling, judo, or jiu jitsu _ is going to be really, really helpful. Not because you are going to initiate an attack and take your enemy (this is an enemy, not a sport “opponent”), but because you were probably jumped by surprise and now you have to fight your way out of the bottom – the stuff grapplers do. There is no substitute for experience in that setting!

BTW, most hand to hand combat drills taught in the military are taught to build up fighting spirit, not to build a squad or company of hand-to-hand fighters. Since jiu jitsu came on the scene, though, the military has actually taken hand-to-hand combat seriously enough to start a Combatives program. Both the “Torrance” Gracies and Gustavo Machado (and probably others) have taught hand to hand combat to military – professor Machado even to Navy Seals.

The Torrance Gracies (Rener and Ryron) specifically state that teaching to real working pros (military and police) is always a two way street – they learn as much about real-life incidents and scenarios, as they teach in terms of techniques. If you ever “win the lottery” and want to find the real, final answer to your question, you need to seek out people like this and take their seminars or actually train under them.

About The Author

Judo DoJo

Judo (meaning "gentle way") is a modern martial art, combat and Olympic sport created in Japan in 1882 by Jigoro Kano . Its most prominent feature is its competitive element, where the objective is to either throw or takedown an opponent to the ground, immobilize or otherwise subdue an opponent with a pin, or force an opponent to submit with a joint lock or a choke. Strikes and thrusts by hands and feet as well as weapons defenses are a part of judo, but only in pre-arranged forms (kata,) and are not allowed in judo competition or free practice. A judo practitioner is called a judoka.